USC Department of
earth sciences
Summer 2013
USC Department of
earth sciences
Summer 2013
I
From the Chair.....
t’s been a while, perhaps 10 years,
since we’ve last issued a newsletter.
One of my hopes as the new Earth
Sciences chairman is to reconnect
with you and remind you of what makes
our department so special and memorable.
I’ve been at USC since 1979, heard stories from Gors and others about the older days—how a margarita at El Cholo’s
saved our department. And I’ve lived
through the evolution of this department
through chairs Davis, Osborne, Douglas,
Hammond, Sammis, Henyey (twice),
Anderson, and Bottjer. My time here
was shaped by these leaders and so many
others: faculty, administrators, students,
post docs. No doubt, we all feel some
connection to this place, and because of
these strong feelings, and my sincere effort to stay in touch, the following newsletter is meant to bring you up to speed,
introduce you to newer faculty, and remind you of the older folks.
Briefly, starting at the turn of the century,
we added Frank Corsetti and Tom Jordan
to the faculty; Frank occupying the role
of department sedimentologist/stratigrapher and Tom as Keck Chair professor
and director of the Southern California
Earthquake Center (SCEC). In 2001, we
added Ken Nealson to the faculty as the
Wrigley Chair, sharing him with Marine
Biology but claiming him as the leader of
our geobiology movement. This was also
the year that Gors decided to move into
retirement, though he is fortunately still
around the department. In 2004, John
Platt (structure and tectonics), Thorsten
Becker (mantle geodynamics) and Will
Berelson joined the faculty. This was also
about the time that Jean Morrison transitioned from faculty member to the administrative side and became a vice-provost at
USC. By 2006, Tom Henyey decided to
step into retirement and in 2007, Richard
Ku followed. This was also the year of the
cluster-hire, a dramatic move initiated by
Marine Biology that got Earth Sciences
partial-appointed faculty members Katrina Edwards, Sergio Sanudo-Wilhelmy
and Jim Moffett. In 2008, we hired Sarah
Feakins (organic geochemistry/paleoclimate) and lost Bob Douglas to retirement.
In 2009, we added Julien Emile-Geay
(climate dynamics) and Meghan Miller (seismology), but Leon Teng stepped
into retirement. In 2010 we added Josh
West (geochemistry/weathering) to our
faculty, and in 2011 both Jean Morrison
and Lawford Anderson (married, you
know) moved to Boston University where
Jean became Provost! Our latest addition comes as a 50% appointment of Jan
Amend (geochemist) who is joint with
Marine Biology.
In 2000, our faculty size was 20 FTEs,
today we’re still at 20±1. Steady state? In
numbers yes, but topically we’ve evolved.
There is a push to grow in climate-related science and an ever-growing field of
geochemistry that takes advantage of the
newest analytical technologies to apply stable and radio-isotope
analysis to study all sorts of Earth system processes. We are
evolving to embrace a more Earth-systems pedagogy and use the
spectrum of earth sciences to tackle prime earth science questions, such as: how Earth environments and life co-evolved; coupling between the deep earth interior and lithospheric structure
and composition; biogeochemical cycles and Earth’s climate; the
mechanics and controls upon earthquake rupture.
We’d like to grow in numbers, stature and strength. Our
graduate student body is 55 strong and all are accepted on a
PhD track and guaranteed 5 years of financial support. Our
undergraduates number 3-7 graduates per year, many of whom
go on to jobs in the field or for further education.
Our faculty win awards (Tom Jordan, AGI and AGU Lehmann
medal; Charles Sammis, Yehuda Ben-Zion and Ken Nealson,
AGU fellows; Frank Corsetti, GSA fellow), our students win
awards (NSF graduate fellowships, best TA in the College and/or
University) and yet the best rewards for our academic life are the
connections/bonds we make, our friendships forged over camping in the rain, cruising through high seas, making the p/s wave
picks, puzzling over stereographic projections, picking foraminifera until we are cross-eyed, tasting a fine-grained rock, finding
the trilobite, and all of the things that make us love the earth
sciences.
With the Facebook, Twitter, and Internet age of connectivity
upon us, I urge us all to remain in touch, using the newer or
even those old-fashioned tools (phone, in person). Alumni
get-togethers will be scheduled for some of the national meetings, and some USC-based alumni events are planned. I look
forward to seeing you at any of these events and look forward
to hearing from you, and your news of others. Visit our alumni
web page (http://dornsife.usc.edu/earth/alumni/) and take a
look at the last page of this Newsletter, as I hope, upon reading
and reminiscing, you’ll consider giving to our great department.
Best wishes,
Will Berelson
USC Maymester in Morocco 2013
D
uring May 2013 five geoscience majors and minors,
along with graduate student Amber Butcher and postdoc Leland O’Driscoll, participated in Maymester in
Morocco taught by Prof. Meghan Miller. The ten-day field
trip included servicing and pulling out 15 portable broadband
seismographs that were deployed in October 2009 as part of
the PICASSO project (NSF-funded grant with John Platt,
Thorsten Becker, and Miller) and learning about the geology
of Morocco from the Precambrian to the Quaternary. The students learned about the tectonic history and fascinating geology while traveling through the region to service broadband
stations across the Atlas Mountains. A few of the many highlights were: the exposed Bou Azzer ophiolite sequence that illustrates the configuration of the oceanic lithosphere obducted
onto the west African craton (~750 Ma), and mantle xenoliths
in Quaternary alkaline basalts from the Middle Atlas consistent with metosomatism of the lithospheric mantle source.
Commencement 2013
O
n 17 May 2013, the Department of Earth Sciences celebrated the accomplishments of the following Graduates and Undergraduates:
PhD:
Amir Allam, adv. Yehuda Ben-Zion
Alyssa Bell, adv. Dave Bottjer
Lauren Chong, adv. Will Berelson
Carie Frantz, adv. Frank Corsetti & Ken Nealson
Melanie Gerault, adv. Thorsten Becker
Thomas Goebel, adv. Thorsten Becker & Charlie Sammis
Amanda Haddad, adv. Katrina Edwards
Adam Ianno, adv. Scott Paterson
Jeffrey McLean, adv. Ken Nealson
Kathleen Ritterbush, adv. Dave Bottjer
Esther Singer, adv. Katrina Edwards
Jagruti Vedamati (Ocean Sciences), adv. Jim Moffett
Feng Wang, adv. Tom Jordan
Shiqing Xu, adv. Yehuda Ben-Zion
B.S.:
Bridget Hellige
Gregory Hufford
Robert MacKay
Alexa Sieracki
Max Wagner
B.A.:
Mina Shahpasandzadeh
Faculty News
Jan Amend
Professor of Earth Sciences and Biological Sciences
A
lthough I’m the newest faculty member in Earth Sciences (ES), I’m not the youngest. I joined USC in the
summer of 2011 as a Professor of Microbial Geochemistry with a split appointment in ES and Marine and Environmental Biology (MEB). Before moving to LA two summers
ago, I was on the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis for
13 years. I should note that southern California is both my new
and old home; I grew up in Palos Verdes, attended UC San Diego
for undergrad, and got my PhD at UC Berkeley. It’s nice to be back.
Since arriving
at USC, I’ve set up
a new lab, recruited three graduate
students and two
post-docs, started
collaborations with
several faculty, initiated my teaching
activities, and written numerous grant
proposals.
One
of these, a 5-year
multi-institutional
NASA Astrobiology
Institute proposal,
was recently funded, and this will
keep me and my group busy with very exciting research into the
subsurface biosphere. The idea is that we want to “practice” sampling and characterizing underground microbial ecosystems on
Earth before we attempt to do so on Mars or other planetary bodies. The subsurface biosphere is also the focus of a new NSF-fund-
Thorsten W. Becker
Professor of Earth Sciences
I am a geophysicist with main interests
in geodynamics and seismology. After a
PhD at Harvard and a post-doc at UCSD,
I joined the faculty as assistant professor in
2004, and got promoted to full professor
in 2012. My research is mainly in numerical modeling of upper mantle convection,
but I’ve always had an earthquake hobby.
Former student members of my group
include Bradford Foley (BSc ‘08), now a
PhD student at Yale, Iain Bailey (PhD ‘09),
now at Swiss Re, Lisa Alpert (PhD ‘12),
now at Aera Energy, Zi-Yu Wu (MSc ‘10),
now in math finance, and Clare Steedman
(MSc‘06), who is in environmental con-
ed USC research center entitled the Center for Dark Energy Biosphere Investigations (C-DEBI). As Associate Director of C-DEBI,
I’m getting my first real exposure to large-scale university administration and project management, and I’m enjoying it.
Research activities, however, are still my bread and butter. Although I rarely spend any time in the lab anymore, I still carry out
field work. Here, my focus is on shallow-sea hydrothermal systems
where sampling is carried out by SCUBA. I’ve had funded research
projects in Papua New Guinea, Italy, and Greece, and next month I
will visit the vents and hot springs in Dominica. Our interests are
many, including the discovery of new organisms and new metabolisms, the limits of life, the origin of life, and the role of microorganisms in arsenic cycling.
The research projects I’m involved in are certainly exciting,
but, without a doubt, my greatest joy in this job is teaching and
mentoring the next generation of scientists. Over the years, first
at Washington University and now at USC, I’ve had some excellent people in my lab. A number of undergraduate students who
did their theses with me went on to graduate school in geobiology, including three at Caltech, two at Penn State, and one at the
Max-Planck Institute in Germany. Several former graduate students landed post-doctoral fellowships at prestigious institutions,
including MIT, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, and the
Marine Biological Lab; and three former members of the Amend
Lab secured tenure track faculty positions at the University of Illinois, the University of Missouri, and Southern Illinois University.
On a personal note, my wife Andrea teaches middle school
science at Westside Neighborhood School in Playa del Rey, and my
two teenagers have decided to attend different high schools, with
my daughter Emma a freshman at Palos Verdes High and my son
Finn to start at Peninsula High this fall.
sultancy. Former postdocs include Boris
Kaus, now an associate professor at Mainz
University, Attreyee Ghosh, an assistant
professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bangalore, and Jules Browaeys,
now at Total Oil. My group currently consists of five graduate students working on
problems including the initiation of plate
tectonics, long-term thermo-chemical
evolution of the mantle, and an analog
earthquake machine. Recent NSF-funded collaborative projects with a number
of colleagues at USC include a seismological deployment in Indonesia (with
Meghan Miller and Josh West), modeling
of post-seismic deformation of the M9 Tohoku earthquake (with David Okaya), and
ongoing work in Morocco (with Meghan
Miller).
Yehuda Ben-Zion
Professor of Earth Sciences
D
uring the last ten years my group <http://earth.usc.edu/~ybz/group/> published over 100 papers on the physics of earthquakes and faults in Geophysics, Physics, and Geology journals. The topics include dynamic ruptures and seismic waves in
structures with bimaterial interfaces and geometrical heterogeneities, damage rheology for irreversible brittle deformation,
material fragmentation and pulverized fault zone rocks, dynamics of avalanches in granular materials, high resolution imaging of fault zone environments, earthquake source properties, and correlations between spatio-temporal seismicity patterns and properties of fault zones and the crust. For details see <http://earth.usc.edu/~ybz/pubs_recent/>
PhD students Zhigang Peng, Michael Lewis, Neta Wechsler and Iain Bailey received Outstanding Student Paper Awards in professional meetings. Zhigang Peng went on to have a productive career on the faculty of Georgia Tech and, in 2010, he received the Charles
Richter Early Career Medal from the Seismological Society of America.
Amir Allam received the prestigious 2012 College-wide and 2013 University-wide outstanding teaching assistant awards at USC. A number
of scientists visited the group for periods ranging from weeks to a year.
These include Vladimir Lyakhovsky (Geological Survey of Israel), Gregor
Hillers and Michel Campillo (Grenoble France), Gert Zöller and Matthias Holschneider (Potsdam Germany), Rafael Benites (GNZ, New Zealand), Karin Dahmen (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), and
Jay Fineberg (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel).
An exciting current research occupying my entire group is a multi-disciplinary 5-yr NSF/Continental-Dynamics project on “Structural Architecture and Evolutionary Plate-Boundary Processes along the San Jacinto
Fault Zone.’ The studies include high-resolution multi-scale seismological, geodetic and geological observations, and development of new theoretical models to analyze and integrate the observations. We recently
submitted a related proposal involving deployments of two dense seismic
arrays on the San Jacinto Fault Zone with 700-1000 seismometers in each array.
Two members of the group, Michael Lewis and Amir Allam, married two members of Dave Bottjer’s group, Sarah Greene and Kathleen Ritterbush, respectively. Dave and I are working on the other members of our groups. Will Berelson
Professor of Earth Sciences
I
t’s been a while since I’ve reported in newsletter form what I’ve
been up to and why—so here goes.
I was appointed to tenure track faculty in 2004 and became
chairman of the department in the summer of 2013. This
marks my 34th year at USC…who knew!
Since joining the tenure track, I have maintained a hefty research program in a range of topics consistent with my eclectic,
or harried, interests and skill set. I still deploy benthic chambers,
no longer called “Berelanders,” but the USC Landers have evolved
from dissolving zinc and styptic pencils to the use of gravity and
springs, only slightly more sophisticated. Recent lander deployments involved a study of Fe fluxes from sediments off the coast
of Oregon/N. California with colleagues James McManus (OSU—
former USC post-doc) and S. Severmann (Rutgers). The success
of that program in 2007 led to our recently funded work in the
Gulf of Mexico; again lander studies in search of iron fluxes (and
their isotopic values), again with McManus and Severmann in the
summer of 2011.
Not only does the lander work continue, but my interest in
Southern California Basin biogeochemistry has not waned. My
first PhD student, Lisa Collins (now a teaching professor at USC)
worked up a 4-year time series of sediment trap data from San
Pedro Basin. With Maria Prokopenko (USC PhD, post-doc and
research faculty, now at Pomona College), we have investigated N
cycling in the suboxic sediments off Mexico and Southern California. This work has branched into a study underway by
3rd-year grad student Caty Tems, who is looking at N isotopes in
laminated sediments as a paleo-OMZ indicator. This work also
includes a study of the Monterey Formation and we rely on the
helpful suggestions of Jon Schwalbach (Aera Energy) as we seek
out core samples and insights.
Ken Nealson was instrumental in my staying at USC and is inspirational when it comes to all things microbiologically geologic.
He and I started studying microbial respiration (oxygen consumption) in 2002 and this work led to the PhD dissertation of Tim
Riedel (now a post-doc at UCLA). In collaboration with Steve
Finkel (USC faculty, Molecular Biology), we continue to examine
microbial respiration under conditions of limited nutrient supply.
John Fleming (4th-year student) and I are investigating how nutrient additions and photochemistry impacts natural populations of
microbes in terms of oxygen consumption.
Teaming up with Doug Capone (USC faculty, Marine Biology) has been great fun and very lucrative in terms of projects we
have funded to investigate nitrogen fixation and carbon export
from waters off Chile/Peru and within the Amazon Plume. The
latter study involves a large complement of scientists, and like my
early work with JGOFS, I really enjoy the spirit of large projects
and the synergy between PIs and students. Laurie Chong (PhD
‘13) has worked on studies of sediment diagenesis as indicators of
carbon and silica export from the
Amazon plume to deep-sea sediments. With Maria Prokopenko
and Laurence Yeung (USC former
post-doc, now at UCLA), we analyzed oxygen isotopes and concentration profiles as indicators of productivity in these field areas. Doug
Hammond (remember him?) was
also a co-investigator on this activity, which included the use of radon to calibrate gas exchange rates.
A recently funded project is a
collaboration with Jess Adkins (Caltech). We are performing lab
(and some field) experiments to examine the formulation and factors that control carbonate dissolution.
It’s a handful, but I am very lucky to have worked with so many
great colleagues. I’ve also got to give credit to three stupendous
technicians, G. Smith (divemaster
at Wrigley Catalina), W. Beaumont (secret research at a government lab in Washington) and Nick
Rollins (lab tech extraordinaire
when not surfing/playing hoops).
Family life is never dull. Nicki
is 10 with newly pierced ears and
a love of horses carried over from
her mom. Chaz is 6 with a love
of all sports, thanks to my prodding. Meredith survived 20102011 while I was cruising for 120
days, and now probably wishes
I had more fieldwork lined up!!
David Bottjer
Professor of Earth Sciences, Biological Sciences and Environmental Studies
D
ave Bottjer stepped down after six years as departmental chair in August of 2012. He had a great time
as Chair and is now concentrating on teaching and
research. His efforts as Chair were made easy because of all of the terrific students in the Paleolab. Recent grads
include Sarah Greene, who finished in the summer of 2011 and
is now a post-doc at the University of Bristol in the UK, Rowan Martindale, who graduated in the summer of 2012 and is
now a post-doc at Harvard, and Scott Mata, who also finished
in summer of 2012 and is currently teaching at Mt. San Antonio College. Current grad students Lydia Tackett and Kathleen
Ritterbush are finishing up their PhDs. Carlie Pietsch is in her
fourth year of the PhD program, and Liz Petsios is in her second
year. This academic year we also have a visiting scholar from the
Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology, Fangchen Zhao.
Work in the Paleolab has included a lot of exciting field excursions over the past few years. Research at Williston Lake in British Columbia with Sarah Greene included an intriguing stay at a
bear-hunting lodge while studying the Triassic-Jurassic (T-J) mass
extinction. Continued work on the T-J mass extinction with Sarah
Greene included a fascinating trip to southwestern England for a
joint study with Frank Corsetti and Yadi Ibarra to examine the
classic stratigraphic sections at St. Audrie’s Bay. Additional work
on the T-J in Nevada and Peru with Kathleen Ritterbush has provided outstanding adventure. Rowan Martindale has thoroughly
examined Upper Triassic reefs in Nevada and Oregon and the Austrian Alps. Lydia Tackett has traveled to northern Italy, Nevada
and Oregon to elucidate Late Triassic ecology during the long No-
rian and possible biotic effects of the Manicouagan impact. Carlie
Pietsch and Liz Petsios have dug into fieldwork on the Early Triassic recovery from the Permian-Triassic mass extinction in Hungary, the Dolomites of northern Italy, and western North America.
And, Scott Mata chased down all wrinkle structures in the classic White- Inyo Mountains and Death Valley Cambrian sections.
Former grads are populating earth science programs across the
country. These include Steve Dornbos and Margaret Fraiser, who
are tenured associate professors at the University of Wisconsin –
Milwaukee. Sara Pruss is currently up for tenure at Smith College,
as is Matthew Clapham at UC Santa Cruz. Adam Woods is now
a tenured Associate Professor at Cal State Fullerton, as is Stephen
Schellenberg at San Diego State. Whitey Hagadorn is settling in
to his new job as Curator of Geology at the Denver Museum of
Nature and Science. Nicole Bonuso is an Assistant Professor at
Cal State Fullerton, as is Pedro Marenco at Bryn Mawr College.
Joining Pedro, Katherine Marenco is a post-doctoral fellow at
Bryn Mawr. Gerald Grellet-Tinner is a research associate at the
Field Museum of Natural History, and Carol Tang is Senior Science Educator and Research Associate at the California Academy
of Sciences. Kate Whidden has recently moved to the USGS in
Denver, where she is a senior research scientist. Reese Barrick is
the Director of the Sternberg Museum at Fort Hays State University
in Kansas. Mary Droser has recently stepped down from being
chair at UC Riverside, where she is Professor. Chuck Savrda is
currently Professor and Interim Dean at Auburn University. And
outside of the US, Kathy Campbell is an associate professor at the
University of Auckland in New Zealand and Jingmai O’Connor is
a post-doc at the IVPP in Beijing, China.
Present and past Paleolab grads have also prospered in their personal as well as professional lives. This February Kathleen Ritterbush and Amir Allam, a geophysics graduate student working with Yehuda Ben-Zion, were married. This continues a trend of Paleolab students marrying geophysics grad students, a route to happiness pioneered by Catherine Powers and Sarah Greene! Catherine
currently lives in Denver and is the mother of two. Another
young family includes Nicole Fraser who lives in Maryland
with husband Harley and their two children. In the Pacific
Northwest, Jennifer Schubert resides with her husband and
son in Seattle, where she practices law. Closer to home in
southern California Kirk Domke is teaching at community
colleges in Orange County and Tran Huynh is a linchpin of
SCEC here at USC.
In addition to being Chair, Dave has been President of the
Paleontological Society, and is in his second decade of being
editor-in-chief of the Elsevier journal Palaeo-3. Sarah Bottjer
currently is Professor in USC’s Department of Biological Sciences and co-Director of the undergraduate neurobiology
major at USC. Dave and Sarah still live at their 1889 house
on Bonsallo Avenue north of campus. They were fortunate
enough to buy the vacant lot next to their house a few years
ago and now have an even larger garden to tend to! Life continues much the same as over the past few decades, including
fall semester bar-b-q’s with intense croquet games and Christmas parties with a featured ham. It has been quite a ride as we have watched USC and our Earth Sciences Department steadily grow in
stature into the twenty-first century!
Frank Corsetti
Associate Professor of Earth Sciences
W
hen I got to USC in the fall of 2000, I was probably known as “the snowball earth guy”. Most of
my work towards tenure involved Neoproterozoic
Earth history revolving around the most severe
ice ages of all time. Since tenure (2006), I have to an extent left
snowball earth behind to focus on biosignatures in
general…what constitutes a sign of life, on ancient
Earth or elsewhere (e.g., Mars)? I have returned to
my long-term interest in stromatolites; in particular,
to investigate their biogenicity (yes, there are abiotic
structures that look like biotic stromatolites…so what happens when we find a stromatolite on Mars?) Much of my work in the past several
years has focused on stromatolites/microbialites,
with a heavy emphasis on lacustrine systems. It
seems funny, but all of my projects right now are
in rocks that are 50 million years or younger…but I
always have an eye towards the Precambrian.
In addition to biosignatures, I have been studying the End Triassic Mass Extinction in conjunction
with Dave Bottjer. The T-J event is pertinent, as it
saw one of the largest rises in atmospheric CO2 in
the Phanerozoic (sound familiar?), and in this case,
it resulted in a mass extinction that decimated coral reefs and other marine life.
I have been co-director of the International Geobiology Summer Course since 2010, and lead 16 of geobiology’s best and brightest on a month-long journey each summer. In other news, this past
year I was elected as a Fellow of the Geological Society of America.
Currently, I have two grad students of my own and I am active
on the committees of many more. Carie Frantz (PhD expected 2013) is studying stromatolites in the Green River Formation
(Eocene), and has demonstrated that the stroms record vast lake
level changes over the course of their formation.
Yadira Ibarra (PhD expected 2014) is studying
a fluvial tufa deposit in northern Santa Barbara
County, where she is attempting to date it and
determine its mode of formation. Preliminary
14C results date it to the last glacial maximum,
so we are excited that it might record climate in
the recent past. She is also studying a microbialite unit associated with the end Triassic mass
extinction in England/Wales.
My former students are doing well. Alison
Olcott (PhD ‘06), my first PhD student, completed a post-doc at WHOI and is now an assistant professor at the University of Kansas (Lawrence…the nice place in Kansas). Nate Lorentz
(PhD ‘07) taught for several years at Dickinson
College in Pennsylvania, and is now back in
LA as an assistant professor at LA City College.
Pedro Marenco (PhD ‘07) did a post-doc with Tim Lyons at UC
Riverside and is now an assistant professor at Bryn Mawr College
in Pennsylvania (Dave Bottjer, Pedro’s co-advisor, attended geology classes there while he was at Haverford College, their sister
school!) Kiri Wagstaff already had a PhD in computer science,
and she received her master’s in Earth Science in 2008 while operating as a full time employee at JPL (where she still resides). Jake
Bailey (PhD ‘08) did a post-doc with Victoria Orphan at some
small university in Pasadena (Caltech) and is now an assistant professor of Geobiology at the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities).
Sean Loyd (PhD ‘11) completed a post-doc at that hated univer-
sity down the road (UCLA) and is a brand new assistant professor
of geochemistry at the California State University, Fullerton. My
most recent PhD graduate, Vicky Petryshyn, is currently a postdoc at UCLA.
Greg Davis
Professor of Earth Sciences
G
reg continues to keep busy—
with full-time teaching at USC
and in Beijing for six weeks each
May and June for the China
University of Geosciences (a grad course in
continental tectonics). His research focus
is exclusively on North China tectonics and
is now mostly rooted in a continuing field
study of early Mesozoic tectonics in western Liaoning province, about 250 km ENE
of Beijing. Two of his former field assistants—Wenrong Cao and Leonardo Xia—
are now grad students at USC studying with
Scott Paterson and John Platt respectively.
His last student, Brian Darby, writes from
Melbourne that he and his wife Kristi (Rikansrud) are enjoying their Chevron as-
signments on different projects for the two
of them. Brian mentions that Cliff Ando
has now joined the growing legion of retired former Davis students. Greg continues to flirt with the idea of retiring, but flirting is all that’s happening these days. His
health is good and he continues to enjoy
teaching—now primarily GE courses, with
the exception of TEWNA, which he taught
again last semester.
For him, a highlight of the Spring 2013
semester was being joined at USC by best
friend and long-ago collaborator Clark
Burchfiel. Clark was on sabbatical leave
from MIT and teaching a grad seminar on
the tectonics of Tibet. He and Greg decided that it is finally time to work up their
decades-old fieldwork and mapping in the
greater Clark Mountains region of the eastern Mojave. Greg’s students will, of course,
remember their geologic adventures in
“Chaos Canyon” weekends from their advanced mapping course. Now, if only Clark
and Greg can remember what they discovered there in the 1960s!
One incident Greg can remember is one
Clark Mountain night with Clark that is
chronicled in the latest issue of GSA “GeoTalesV”. He (Clark) will hate Greg for sharing it with the GSA and with the readers
of this departmental report. But, here it
is. Skip it if you’d like, but some of you will
probably enjoy it …
The Bug
Clark Burchfiel and I worked together for a decade, mapping parts of the Mesozoic foreland fold and thrust belt in
the eastern Mojave Desert of California. Neither of us will ever forget that July 3rd night in the summer of 1964,
when we were camped on the lower, eastern slopes of Clark Mountain near the Nevada border. It had been a typical long, hot, tiring field day and a good night’s sleep was our only objective as night fell. It was not to happen ...
It was still too warm to crawl into sleeping bags, so both of us lay on top of them before falling asleep. Early the
next morning when it was still very dark I was awakened by Clark’s frantic voice.
“Greg, wake up! You’ve got to help me! Greg, WAKE UP!”
The intensity of his words meant something serious was happening and I was immediately wide-awake. I turned
my flashlight on and directed its beam at him. He was sitting upright on his sleeping bag, one hand to the side of
his head.
“What’s the matter, Clark? What’s happening?”
His desperate response was surprising — to say the least.
“I’VE GOT A BUG IN MY EAR! It’s flapping around inside my ear and it’s driving me crazy! You’ve GOT
to get it out!”
Despite the somewhat humorous imagery his words conveyed to me, it was obvious that my friend was in real and
serious distress. But how could I get a bug out of his ear, when it was apparently deep enough that its removal
wouldn’t be possible without proper instruments? Even if I had had them, I couldn’t possibly use them in the dead
of night to extract a tiny bug. And then, I had an idea. If I couldn’t get the bug out, I could at the least kill it.
I got up and walked to our field kitchen area. There it was, the solution to Clark’s problem. Taking the bottle I had
located easily, I returned to Clark.
He looked at me with both surprise and suspicion. “What are you going to do?”
“Lay on your side, bug ear up,” I told him.
“What’s the Mazola oil for?” he asked.
“I’m going to pour it in your ear. It’ll immobilize the bug and eventually kill it. It won’t be able to breathe. Now, give me your ear.”
He was clearly unconvinced of the wisdom of my planned emergency treatment, but the wing-flapping bug inside his
ear was his immediate concern, not an oily ear. I believe I can still recall the soft “glug ... glug” sound of the thick
Mazola oil as I poured it slowly into his upturned ear.
“Can you still feel the bug?” I asked when I had finished pouring.
“No. Great! It’s not moving around anymore. Thank heavens.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes, thanks. I think you’ve killed it.”
“Good,” I said, anxious to get back to sleep.
He and I returned to our sleeping bags to complete our night’s rest. I quickly dozed off. I don’t recall how much
time had elapsed when I once again heard Clark’s distraught voice. It was still quite dark.
“Greg, wake up! WAKE UP!”
Rather groggily, I answered. “What’s the matter?”
His voice, only a little less frantic than earlier that night, was still unmistakably anguished.
“I’VE GOT A DEAD BUG IN MY EAR! You’ve got to get it out!”
“Clark,” I said calmly, “there’s nothing more I can do. When it gets light we can drive into Las Vegas to an emergency hospital and someone there can take the bug out. So, please, go back to sleep. Your ear
will be fine.”
Given my obvious lack of action, he agreed reluctantly with my plan. Later that 4th of July morning, in the emergency ward of a Vegas hospital, the bug was indeed removed, but not easily, as Clark was to tell me. He met me in the
waiting room after the procedure, holding his hand against his
ear. His face was devoid of color and his grim expression told
me that his treatment had not gone well. I still remember his
words:
“That was the most painful experience I’ve ever had.”
he explained. “I don’t think the doctor was a doctor! Maybe
he was a holiday substitute. He probed my ear for about 30
minutes getting pieces of the bug one at a time, but by the time
he had finished my ear was bleeding and I was worrying about
permanent damage.”
Doctor or not, the bug and its Mazola coating were gone.
We both slept well that evening.
James Dolan
Professor of Earth Sciences
W
ow! Ten years since the last newsletter. Lots has
happened during that span. Here we go. My students and colleagues and I have done a lot of really
interesting research over the past decade. As most
of you probably know, I am an active tectonicist, which means that
I like to work on things that have moved since last Tuesday (in geological terms, at least). The Active Tectonics group at USC works
mainly at the critically important time scale of one to a few dozen
earthquakes, with the goal of understanding the detailed interactions amongst the various tectonic elements that comprise plate
boundaries. These studies are inherently multi-disciplinary, and
we operate at the interface between structural geology, seismology, tectonic geomorphology, geodynamics, and seismic hazard assessment, and take full advantage of emerging technologies such
as LiDAR airborne laser swath mapping, cosmogenic radionuclide
dating, and COSI-Corr sub-ixel image correlation.
Our group continues to do a lot of research in southern California, including lots of paleoseismologic trenching and numerous
fault slip rate determinations designed to elucidate spatial and temporal patterns of strain release in the Pacific-North America plate
boundary in southern California. This may seem like a daunting,
lifelong project, but we and our Southern California Earthquake
Center colleagues are making major progress. Many interesting
patterns suggestive of long-distance and long-term fault interactions are beginning to emerge.
After a decade of working in Turkey, I have recently started
a large collaborative project in New Zealand with UCLA collaborator Ed Rhodes and our Kiwi colleagues Russ Van Dissen and
Rob Langridge at GNS Science. Together, we are examining the
collective behavio(u)r of the four big strike-slip faults that make
up the Marlborough fault system in northern South Island (aka.
the “mainland” to South Islanders, South Island being ~2% larger
in area than North Island. I absolutely love that!) As both a tectonic geomorphologist and paleoseismologist, I have to say that the
Marlborough faults represent one of the most “target-rich” environments I’ve ever seen anywhere in the world. What a great place
to do active tectonics!
So let’s see, what have
my graduate students been
doing in the past decade?
Ross Hartleb (PhD ‘05)
did some great, pioneering
paleoseismology on the
North Anatolian fault in
Turkey, as well as mapping
both the 1999 Izmit and
Duzce earthquake surface
ruptures on that fault. Ross
is now a Senior Geologist at
Lettis Consultants International.
Kurt Frankel (PhD 2007) went on to become an assistant pro
fessor at Georgia Tech. Tragically, during July 2011, while on vacation with his beloved wife Stephanie, Kurt was struck by a car
and killed while on an early morning bike ride. As many of you
probably know, Kurt was well on his way to becoming an academic
superstar in the world of tectonic geomorphology. Amongst his
many talents, he was becoming an absolute guru of LiDAR digital
topographic imaging and analysis, the tool he helped bring into the
mainstream during his PhD work on the Death Valley-Fish Lake
Valley fault system in eastern California. Despite being cut down at
such a young age, Kurt had an enormous impact, and the community has lost one of its brightest talents and future leaders. As any of
you who knew him personally can attest, in addition to his exceptional scientific talents Kurt was a truly wonderful person, and his
death has left a huge hole in the hearts of all who knew and loved
him. I miss his laugh most of all. A truly devastating loss.
Özgür Kozacı (PhD ‘07) did a really cool dissertation generating slip rates and paleo-earthquake ages and displacements from
the North Anatolian fault, providing some of the best-constrained
fault slip rates I’ve ever seen (and further developing 36Cl cosmogenic radionuclide production rates, to boot!) Özgür is now a Senior Geologist with Fugro Consultants. Lorraine Leon (PhD ‘09)
did her dissertation on the paleoseismology of blind thrust faults
beneath the LA metropolitan region, refining and advancing the
earlier techniques we developed with USC graduate student Shari
Christofferson (MS ‘01) and collaborators John Shaw at Harvard
and Tom Pratt at the USGS. Lorraine also won both the College
and University TA of the year awards. Lorraine is currently a geologist for Chevron, working on Central Valley oil and gas fields.
Erik Frost (PhD ‘09) explored an exhumed strike-slip fault in the
Alps to study just how localized slip is on major strike-slip faults.
Erik is now a Project Geologist for Lettis Consultants International
working on a variety of large projects both here in the States and
elsewhere around the world. Plamen Ganev (PhD ‘11) worked on
several projects in the eastern California shear zone and along the
Garlock fault. отличен работа, Plamen! Plamen is now working
for Aera Petroleum, and is
also starting an MBA at the
state school across town.
Ben Haravitch (MS ‘11)
did a neat study in which
he systematically compared
slip at depth in earthquakes
with slip measured at “the
fault” at the surface by geologists. Ben’s results are of
fundamental importance to
the proper interpretation of
fault slip rates, which are of
course the basic inputs into
modern probabilistic seismic hazard analyses. Ben is
Simulation of near-field strong ground motions during 1872 Mw 7.6-ish earthquake. Lone Pine, CA, 2000. Owens valley fault extends
along fence line at rear of basketball court. From Left to Right: Ross Hartleb, Pedro Marenco, James Dolan, and Marcos Marin (Hey G!).
now a consulting geologist working in upstate New York.
Current doctoral student Lee McAuliffe (finishing at the end
of next year…Right, Lee?) has done three great projects for his
dissertation. In one of these, in collaboration with our Harvard colleagues John Shaw and Judith Hubbard and our USGS colleague
Tom Pratt, Lee has documented evidence for two very large-magnitude (Mw7>7.5) earthquakes on the Ventura fault in downtown
Ventura. This fault, responsible for uplift of the famous Ventura
Avenue anticline, appears to rupture together with other thrusts in
the transverse ranges fault system in truly mega quakes that may
rival the “Big Ones” generated by the more-famous San Andreas.
Chris Milliner started his PhD here in Fall 2011. Chris is currently using COSI-Corr (Co-registration of Optically sensed Im-
ages and Correlation, and yes, I did have to look that up!) with
high-resolution aerial photographs to examine surface deformation patterns in several large earthquakes (starting with the 1992
Landers and 1999 Hector Mine earthquakes). In a related effort,
postdoc James Hollingsworth (now a CNRS researcher at the
University of Nice in France) did some amazingly cool work using COSI-Corr and satellite imagery to analyze the total amount of
surface deformation in 10 large-magnitude earthquakes. Finally, I
am expecting great things from incoming doctoral students Jessica
Grenader and Robert Zinke. I’ll fill you in on their exploits in the
next issue (which hopefully will arrive sooner than 2023!)
Sorry this was so long, and thanks for reading all the way
through. What can I say, I’m a chatty guy…
Julien Emile-Geay
Assistant Professor of Earth Sciences
E
veryone wants to know the future, and Earth scientists know better than anyone that it is not possible without understanding
the past.
Much of our knowledge of climate dynamics is encapsulated into global climate models (GCMs), which mathematically encode the physical, chemical, and biological processes that govern the evolution of Earth’s outer envelopes. How much should we
believe their predictions? This is a harder question than it looks, as the instrumental record (starting around 1850) is too short to reliably
test predictions made a century, or even a few decades, ahead of time. Only the longer paleoclimate record can help in this validation
effort, something my august predecessors at USC have known for a long time.
I joined USC in 2009 and have been hard at work ever since, mostly to better understand the role of the Tropics in long-term climate
variability. The central actor of this game is of course the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon, enfant terrible of the Pacific, whose (mis)behavior influences societies and ecosystems all over the Pacific rim and beyond. We know El Niño is predictable up to 2
years in advance, but at this point we know too little of his long-term evolution to be able to judge whether our decadal forecasts have any
value. Whether the tropical Pacific will come to resemble El Niño or its opposite phase, La Niña, in the coming decades or centuries is a
question of utmost importance for anyone living near it; in particular,
water availability in the western US, and the livelihoods of millions of
farmers & residents will depend crucially on this information.
To test the climate model representation of El Niño, we do have
a lot of information about how El Niño behaved over past centuries
(even millennia) from high-resolution paleoclimate archives like
annually-banded corals. Amazing though they are, however, these
proxies don’t tell us directly what we want to know (they are, well,
proxies).
My research focus is to bridge the gap between proxies and models, by teaching them a common language. The approach is twofold:
on the one hand, I try to get models to talk “proxy lingo” by developing process-based numerical models of climate proxies. I have been
joined in this NOAA-funded project by graduate student Sylvia Dee,
who together with CU Boulder’s David Noone and USC postdoc Nik
Buenning, has been making great strides in modeling water isotopes
in the atmosphere. We are just beginning to couple this model to
simple mechanistic models of ice cores, corals, speleothems and treering cellulose. Joining in this journey have been Mike Evans (U. Maryland) and Julie Cole (U. Arizona).
On the other hand, I use and develop sophisticated statistical techniques to translate the paleoclimate record into a language that models (and physicists) can relate to. In this inverse approach, funded by two NSF grants, I have enjoyed collaborations with Tapio Schneider
(formerly at CalTech, now at ETH), Bala Rajaratnam (Stanford) and Martin Tingley (Harvard). USC post-doc Dominique Guillot (now
at Stanford) developed a brand new method of climate field reconstruction based on the theory of graphical models, which PhD student
Jianghao Wang will use to reconstruct global temperature over the past 2,000 years.
Somewhere in between these forward and inverse views lies a new horizon for climate research. Nothing stimulates new ideas like old
climates.
Sarah Feakins
Assistant Professor of Earth Sciences
I
started a program using organic and isotope geochemistry to explore past climates here in the Earth Sciences
department at USC in August 2008. Thanks to generous support from USC and the WiSE program I was
able to establish a lab with cutting-edge instrumentation, including a gas chromatograph isotope ratio mass spectrometer to analyze the C and H isotopic composition of plant leaf
waxes, which turn out to be really remarkable molecules for
reconstructing past climate change.
My lab is currently graced by graduate students hailing
from upstate New York (Hannah Liddy, Bard College) and
Macau (Mong Sin Wu, Hong Kong University), as well as
post-docs from Colombia (Camilo Ponton, MIT/WHOI)
and Germany (Bernhard Aichner/AWI Potsdam). I have
two awesome undergraduates as well (Alexa Sieracki and
Clara Hua). This past year we’ve also had students and postdocs visiting including: Bernd Hoffmann (Potsdam, Germany), Eva Niedermeyer (Germany & Caltech) and Trevor
Porter (U. Alberta).
Here’s a photo of our lab group lunch last year from left to
right: Kyle McAlahney, Hannah Liddy, Michael Cheetham, Paulina Pinedo, Jack Seeley, Susan Oh, Alexa Sieracki, Zhilin Zhang, Miguel
Rincon, Sarah Feakins.
Our lab’s activities have been in the news a lot this year, with a Nature Geoscience paper on Antarctica during the Middle Miocene
with coverage on radio in New Zealand, Canada and PBS, as well as news outlets around the world. Another in Geology this year has
started to make a bit of a splash concerning African environments during early human evolution. Some of that coverage can be found
here: http://earth.usc.edu/feakins/press.
Donn Gorsline
Emeritus Professor of Earth Sciences
T
he Department emeriti group
includes Al Fischer (now in Santa
Barbara), Donn Gorsline, Barney
Pipkin, Bob Douglas, Richard Ku,
Leon Teng and Tom Henyey. Over the past
year Barney, Bob and Donn have had a few
lunch get togethers and in January, brought
together Richard, Leon, Barney, Bob and
Donn for a lunch at the new university center
to begin what we will try to do as a regular
event. All seem to be doing interesting things
and are interested in the progress of the department.
Bob Douglas is publishing a book thru
the AEG on the Portuguese Bend landslide.
Richard and Leon are doing cooperative work with colleagues in Taiwan, and Barney is keeping the oceanography lab manual
up to date. Donn has completed a three-year
project to get his house in the West Adams area on the Historic/
Cultural monument list and that was approved late last year as
monument number 1021. All wish to encourage old grads to keep
in touch with all of us and the department activities.
USC Earth Sciences Emeriti Lunch
From left to right: Richard Ku, Barney Pipkin, Donn
Gorsline, Bob Douglas, and Leon Teng.
Doug Hammond
Professor of Earth Sciences
I
can’t remember when I last communicated, so I will stretch those gray
cells (below the few gray hairs that
remain) back to about 2007. My interests in ocean nutrient cycling continue,
with an emphasis on silicon and its partially faithful proxy, germanium. A cruise to
the Cascadia Basin, offshore from Oregon
and Washington, collaborating with Paul
Johnson and Susan Hautala (both of UW)
led to several articles, including the MS
thesis of Tabitha Esther on Ge/Si behavior in sediments and deep water. Tabitha
has since proceeded into dual careers as an
analytical chemist and author of children’s
theater presentations, with a science twist.
Two undergrads also completed a Senior
Thesis on various aspects of this project:
Amelia Paukert has since gone on to a
Fulbright Fellowship in Kazahkstan and is
now in a Ph.D. program at Columbia University, working on CO2 sequestration in
ophiolites; Becky Gallagher has gone on
to a career in mineral exploration with BP
Minerals in Australia, and both send occasional emails.
The germanium work has evolved into
a program to measure Ge stable isotopes,
now supporting graduate student Jotautas
Baronas. Jotis hails from Lithuania, but
did his undergraduate work in Germany
and joined us in 2011, in time to join a
Will Berelson/Jim McManus/Silke Severmann cruise in the Gulf of Mexico. Never
having visited the Gulf, I was astounded at
the density of oil platforms, counting lights
from 75 within view one night.
Application of radioisotopes to characterize material transport rates continues to
be an active interest. Christa Wolfe joined
us from Cal State Fullerton, and completed
an MS project looking at the use of core incubations to estimate benthic fluxes of radium isotopes. This technique can provide
an important constraint on using radium
to establish mixing rates. About the time
Christa finished, Rick Schwartz, who had
retired from teaching Chemistry at Torrance High and worked for us since 2004,
decided to retire again. Rick’s assistance
was sorely missed, and Christa stayed with
our group as a lab tech. Rick and Christa
were responsible for cleaning several de-
cades of old samples and treasured equipment from ZHS 333, and re-organizing it
into the newly refurbished space that is
now shared with Josh West and his group.
There are still a few things that I cannot
find (the story of life), but the workspace
looks remarkably well organized (see Josh’s
write-up for more details) and is now filled
with a cadre of busy students. Christa has
now left to pursue a career in the medical
field, which she seems to enjoy even more
than analyzing biogenic silica and radon.
Collaboration with Will Berelson and
Masha Prokopenko continues, now featuring the efforts of grad student Willie
Haskell. Willie joined our program 4 years
ago, after undergrad work at U. Miami. He
jumped into field work on a cruise headed by Will and Doug Capone (of MEB),
using Th-234 as a proxy for carbon export
from surface waters in the Eastern Tropical South Pacific. This led to an article that
has just been accepted, and a successful
NSF proposal with Masha to look at carbon
export from the photic zone in an upwelling regime. This project is now underway,
using a variety of isotopic and mass bal-
ances to look at carbon export for the region offshore from San Pedro. Masha is
splitting time between USC and Pomona
College where she has adjunct faculty appointments.
Other projects continue. Josh West has
gotten me involved in a project looking at
landscape evolution in China. My contribution is looking at reservoir sediments,
with assistance from undergrad Zichen
Xiao. We will also look at mixing in the
deep sea as part of the US Geotraces program, using Ac-227. Newly arrived grad
student Audra Bardsley (who worked with
alum Jian Peng at the OC Water Agency)
has begun looking at the effects of pyrite
oxidation on groundwater trace metal behavior. Undergrads Renee Wang and Minda Monteagudo have been doing summer
internships, and Baron Barrera helps out
when he can get a break from summer
school.
I still hear from several alums who
spent time in the Hammond group. Bret
Leslie has been at the NRC in Washington,
and has just taken a new job with DOE on
the US Nuclear Waste Technical Review
Doug Hammond, center, with alums Chi-An Huh and Hong Chun Li at
National Taiwan University in Taipei
Board. Before he left, he helped facilitate
the hiring of 2013 alum Alexa Sieracki
at NRC. Blayne Hartman has become a
heavyweight in environmental problems
with vapor intrusion, now working as an independent consultant and lecturing around
the world. Joe Donoghue came through
town last winter and is now at Oklahoma
State University. Sam Limerick and Gayle Haraguchi are both working in Reno.
Harris Talsky is not far away, teaching rock
climbing and thinking about grad school.
Steve Colbert is teaching at U. Hawaii Hilo.
Shelley Howard (Tripolone) has just gotten married and is working in the OC at
AECom. She and husband Brian came to
give a talk to our undergrads this spring,
about environmental careers. Also working at AECom is Madeline Worsnopp. She
and Nate Lorentz have returned from PA.
Nate is teaching at LACC. Larry Miller
and Chris Fuller are still at USGS in Menlo Park, busy with many projects. Former
undergrad Kevin Bartell is working in the
oil industry in Bakersfield and doing an online MS in Petroleum Engineering at USC.
And finally, Timur and Altay, who put in
many hours of various efforts in ZHS 325,
are both doing well. Timur is in a PhD program in Cultural Geography at UCLA, and
has spent the past two years doing research
in Turkey about the development of Eyup,
a strongly religious region of Istanbul. Jane
and I got to visit him in May - a very interesting place. Altay has just graduated from
CS East Bay, with a degree in Economics
and History, and is now job-hunting. He is
open to offers.
Thomas H. Jordan
University Professor, W. M. Keck Foundation Chair in Geological Sciences and Professor of Earth Science
I
moved from MIT to USC in 2000 to become director of the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC), which has since grown
into a very large international collaboration involving over 600 scientists at more than 60 universities and research organizations.
One of my main jobs is to invent plausible acronyms for new SCEC activities and then get them funded as large-scale projects. Here
I can claim some success with coinages including Undergraduate Studies in Earthquake Information Technology (UseIT), a national intern program that brings undergrads to USC each summer; the Uniform California Earthquake Rupture Forecast (UCERF), now
California’s standard forecast; the Collaboratory for the Study of Earthquake Predictability (CSEP), an international cyberinfrastructure
for testing earthquake forecasting models worldwide; the Software Environment for Integrated Seismic Modeling (SEISM); and—my
particular favorite—the Virtual Institute for the Study of Earthquake Systems (VISES), which is a major research partnership with Japan.
While at USC, I have supervised ten graduate students. Po Chen (PhD ‘05) and I developed the scattering-integral method of full-3D waveform tomography and published
the first earth models using this method.
As an assistant professor at the University of Wyoming, Po has developed algorithms for
3D tomography that run on the nation’s largest supercomputers and is a key participant
in SEISM. Jeremy Zechar (PhD ‘08), who did his thesis work on earthquake forecasting,
is now an Oberassistent and Lecturer at ETH Zürich and heavily involved in CSEP. Peter
Powers (PhD ‘09) used high-precision earthquake catalogs to investigate damage zones
and near-fault seismicity; he is now a research scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey in
Golden, Colorado, and is incorporating the latest California forecast, UCERF3, into the
National Seismic Hazard Mapping Project.
My current research is focused on system-level models of earthquake processes, earthquake forecasting, continental dynamics, and tomography. I’ve recently published a number of papers on earthquake forecasting and forecast evaluation, including a major study
of operational earthquake forecasting by the International Commission on Earthquake
Forecasting, which I chaired. I am an author (with J. Grotzinger) of two popular textbooks, Understanding Earth and The Essential Earth, which I use in teaching a general
education course “Planet Earth” at USC; the 2nd edition of the latter was published last
year and the 7th edition of the former will come out next January. I was a member of the
Council of the National Academy of Sciences from 2006 to 2009 and served on the Governing Board of the National Research Council
from 2008 to 2011. I am currently a member of the California Earthquake Prediction Evaluation Council and president of the Seismological Society of America.
Yong-Gang Li
Associate Professor (Research) of Earth Sciences
S
ince I came to this department, I have kept my research for
30 years on earthquake investigation projects supported by
the National Science Foundation, US Geological Survey
and Southern California Earthquake
Center. With my colleagues at USC and other institutions, I carried
out seismic experiments at active faults
from northern to southern California,
including the fault at Oroville, the San
Andreas fault at Cienega Valley, Parkfield, Pine Canyon, Palmdale, San Bernardino, Banning and Coachella Valley,
the San Jacinto fault at Punchbowl, Anza
and Coyote Mountain, the Superstition
Hills fault in the Imperial Valley, and the
Johnson Valley–Emerson Lake fault, Bullion Mountain–Lavic Lake fault and Calico fault in East Mojave Desert, as well
as the faults in Great Los Angeles Basin. I
also with my international colleagues carried out experiments at the Nojima fault
in Japan, the Longmen-Shan fault in China and the Greendale–Port Hills faults
in New Zealand. Through analyses and
modeling of the data acquired in these
experiments, we delineated fault-zone
damage structures at seismogenic depths in various environments
and illuminated the procession of co-seismic rock damage and
post-main shock healing at these active faults associated with recent major earthquakes, including the 1966 and 2004 M6 Parkfield
earthquakes, the 1986 M6.1 North Palm Springs earthquake, the
1987 M6.7 Superstition Hills earthquake, the 1992 M7.4 Landers
- 1999 M7.1 Hector Mine earthquakes, the 1994 M6.7 Northridge
earthquake, the 1995 M7.2 Kobe earthquake, the 2008 M8 Wenchuan earthquake and the 2010 M7.1 Darfield – 2011 M6.3
Christchurch earthquakes. Although our
investigations have resulted in a sequence
of publications, we still need to learn more
about the interior earth and do more for
earthquake mitigation in southern California and in the world. Doesn’t matter; I take
the bitter with the sweet in research. This is
my life in the past and future. I am happy to
do it.
Recently, I edited a geophysics book “Imaging, Modeling and Assimilation in Seismology” published by Walter De Gruyter
jointly with China Higher Education Press
(2012), which was accomplished partly when
I was an invited professor at Fudan University. This year, I am invited as an Honorary
Professor at China Academy of Geological
Science to explore future research collaborative projects. I also serve as a member of the
appraisal committee for outstanding Chinese overseas graduate students awarded by the China Ministry of
Education.
Steve Lund
Professor of Earth Sciences
I can’t remember the last time I tried to summarize what I do or have done. The last six years or so have seen me participating in two
Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) expeditions to the Tahiti coral reef (Expedition 310 - 2006) and the Bering Sea (Expedition
323 - 2009). Both produced significant Quaternary paleomagnetic and paleoenvironmental results, some published, others still in progress. I still do a lot of Quaternary lake work, some from cores I have
collected (Pyramid Lake), but mostly from cores others have collected
(Zaca Lake, California; Laguna Mincua, Mexico; a bunch of lakes in
Africa). My graduate students have been busy, as well. Emily Mortazavi just finished an MS on Holocene Amazon Fan deep-sea sediments,
and Marci Richardson passed her quals and is finishing her PhD on
Planetary-scale magnetic field models, while she still works full-time
at JPL. I continue to have more data and samples than I can shake a
stick at, and spend 3-4 weeks per year at Oregon State University and
UC Davis making paleomagnetic measurements. Life has changed in
some respects, however. After spending a year as President of the College Faculty Council, I took a sabbatical and, on my return, completely
gave up on USC administrative activities. The result has been a marked
increase in productivity and satisfaction with my continuing teaching
and research activities.
Meghan S. Miller
Assistant Professor of Earth Sciences
I
arrived at USC in early 2009 and the past four years have flown by
with teaching and research. I am working a series of projects funded by the NSF, most of which focus on plate boundaries, and, in particular, subduction zones where oceanic plates are descending into
the Earth’s deep interior. These regions are where most recent tectonic activity, as observed as seismicity and volcanism, is localized, making them
natural targets of high scientific and societal relevance.
I started off my tenure track appointment by deploying 15 broadband seismometers across the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, as part of
the NSF-funded PICASSO project in collaboration with John Platt and
Thorsten Becker. My post-doc, Iain Bailey (USC alum), and I spent a
few weeks per year in the field servicing and installing ~35 instruments
in Morocco, which have collected beautiful data from many of the recent earthquakes, like the Tohoku (2011), Haiti (2010), and Chile (2010)
earthquakes.
In 2011, I was awarded an NSF CAREER grant to work on imaging and
understand the evolution of arcuate subduction zones. This has allowed
me to recruit some more excellent people to my group: Daoyuan Sun
(Caltech) as a post-doc and Amber Butcher as a PhD candidate. In late
2012, Thorsten Becker, Josh West, and I were funded by NSF to work a
field-based project in Indonesia and East Timor which aims to understand the collision of Australia with the Banda volcanic arc. We will head
to the field in early 2014 with my new post-doc Leland O’Driscoll (U
Oregon). But first I will be going back to Morocco with 6 USC undergraduate majors as part of the new USC Maymester program to take out
the seismometers and learn more about observational seismology and
tectonophysics in the field.
My first student, Panxu Zhang, graduated in September 2012 and is
now working at Schlumberger in Houston. My first post-doc, Iain Bailey, took a position at Swiss Re in New York State.
Ken Nealson
Wrigley Chair in Environmental Studies and Professor of Earth Sciences and Biological Sciences
T
his is my first attempt at an informal message since arriving at USC in 2001 as the Wrigley Professor of Environmental Sciences, with the major appointment in Earth Sciences. It has been a GREAT 12 years in many ways. I came to USC from Caltech/JPL, and
have maintained strong ties with JPL, where several students have done part or all of
their thesis work (Roh Bhartia just finished his Ph.D. developing a new type of microscope), and
where others (Laura Barge finished a couple of years ago and is a postdoc working on mineral
biosignatures) have become postdocs and/or employees. My background is biochemistry and
microbiology, but I have been working in the area of geobiology for more than 30 years. The
department took a big “chance” hiring me, with no training in Earth Sciences, and they are to be
commended for their willingness to do so – who knew how it would work out? In the end, we
now have one of the best geobiology programs in the country!
The metrics of “success” are many in academia: 1) publications – I have managed (with great
students and postdocs) to publish about 140 papers (about 10 per year) in good journals; 2) students – I have graduated 9 Ph.D. students (including 4 females & one Hispanic), all of whom are
doing well; 3) I have mentored 10 postdocs, all of whom are doing well; 4) a host of undergrads have worked in the lab, winning awards
of various kinds, and most importantly, going on to good graduate schools and/or jobs; 5) I have maintained a strongly funded lab; and,
6) I have been an ambassador of the department (and USC), giving many invited talks around the country and around the world – yes,
these years at USC have been very kind to me!
Just what is going on? 1) Carie Frantz is working on stromatolite structure and composition jointly with Frank Corsetti; 2) Prithvi
Chellamuthu is developing methods for Selenium bioremediation; 3) Wayne Harris has discovered a new type of microbial behavior
related to attachment of bacteria to minerals; 4) Jeff McLean has isolated new types of bacteria involved with human minerals (tooth
decay); and with colleagues at the Venter Institute in San Diego, we have found microbes living in extreme conditions where no earthly
organism should be living—the fun goes on.
I helped Will Berelson and Frank Corsetti get the International Geobiology Course established at USC, and now, under their guidance,
it has become one of the “gems” of USC, attracting wonderful students each summer. This course is known around the world, and has
been an incubator for the future stars of the field of Geobiology: kudos to Will and Frank for their efforts and success in this important
arena.
Presently, I have five graduate students and 4 postdocs in the lab, and we are focusing efforts in two areas: 1) extracellular electron
transport as it relates first, to the oxidation and reduction of metal-containing minerals, and second, to bioenergy, and 2) extreme environments and the organisms living there: e.g., ultra basic (pH ≈ 12), serpentinization- driven sites, and deep subsurface sites). Both
projects are going well, are reasonably well funded, and keep us busy in the lab and the field.
I enjoy teaching, and for several years have been teaching the undergraduate honors course “The concept of change in science” —linking the study of geobiology, to life detection and NASA missions—lots of fun. I also teach three graduate/undergrad courses focusing on
various aspects of geobiology.
On a personal note, eight years ago, Molly (my wife) and I became legal guardians for three young girls (who we eventually adopted)
—they are now 9, 10.5 and 12 years old. We are all surviving this “ordeal” and are doing well. How they put up with me, I will never
understand, but I remain thankful for my friends, colleagues and family, and look forward to the future in geobiology at USC.
David Okaya
Associate Professor (Research) of Earth Sciences
G
reetings from Tokyo... er, Wellington... um, LA?
Sometimes I lose track of what time zone I am in. I’m
still on the research faculty in the department. My research efforts have centered on plate boundaries that are
outside North America and I’ve been a global traveler, carrying out
seismic field experiments and visiting international collaborators
for productive research stays.
My research project with Tom Henyey (Emeritus professor) to
study continental transpression at the Alpine fault in South Island,
New Zealand, reached conclusion with the publication of AGU
Monograph 175 (2007), a collection of nearly twenty papers that
summarizes the multi-disciplinary
findings of our project. Interacting with the collective team of US
and New Zealand scientists and
students who worked on our project made editing the book a great
experience.
Science begets science. A participant in our New Zealand project
established an integrated geophysical study of the Pacific-Eurasian
plate boundary at Taiwan. I worked
with Francis Wu (now a Visiting
Scientist in our department) as he
organized a multi-disciplinary Taiwan-USA-Canada-France team to
examine the dynamics of arc colli-
sion and mountain building that forms the nation island. Observations were a foundation of this project. With a Taiwan counterpart
I carried out crustal scale explosion refraction profiling across the
island and the landward side of seismic onshore-offshore profiling
using seismic instruments and the US marine research ship R/V
Langseth. I’ve added ‘ni hao’ to my list of international greetings.
I’ve recently renewed my collaborations in New Zealand. We have
carried out earthquake and active-source seismic experiments to
image the Hikurangi subducting slab as it descends quite shallowly
beneath Wellington. Expanding into passive seismology, I’m
finding that local earthquakes
may serve as additional imaging
sources, a freebie that we’re also
finding useful in Taiwan due to
high seismicity rates.
As another effort to study the
subduction process, I’ve been
fortunate to establish a working
collaboration with the University of Tokyo to study slab subduction beneath Tokyo itself.
Going beyond seismology, I am
starting to use geodynamical
modeling as a tool to better understand results that arise from
seismic studies. There are two
slabs beneath Tokyo that push
on each other, and the geodynamical modeling is giving us
an indication of slab stresses that may correlate with some of the
Tokyo earthquakes.
In parallel to these observational seismic efforts, I am working
on fundamentals of crustal seismic anisotropy caused by deformational and metamorphic fabrics. This has involved concepts of material elasticity plus doing numerical simulations using anisotropic
full wavefield seismic propagation code. I’ve enjoyed discussions
about rock fabrics with faculty members Scott Paterson and John
Platt, and their students.
Other departmental interactions: Scott, Vali Memeti (Adjunct
research assistant professor), and former student Geoff Pignotta
(assistant professor, Wisconsin-Eau Claire) on thermal processing involving pluton stoping; Thorsten Becker on large-scale stress
Scott Paterson
Professor of Earth Sciences
H
ello alums! Hope to see you all
soon in LA or at an upcoming
meeting. When not working on
home projects, or traveling to visit Vali in
Durham, England, much of my research
continues to focus on the construction and
evolution of continental margin arcs, which
include studies of both the magmatic systems in these arcs and the tectonism occurring in both the plutons and surrounding
metamorphic host rocks. My students (see
below), colleagues, and I presently have
ongoing research projects in the Cascades
core, Washington, the Sierra Nevada, California, Joshua Tree National Park, and
in northwestern Argentina. We also have
some work going on in northern China and
Mongolia, and England. These research efforts have led us to particularly focus on:
(1) tilted arc crustal sections exposed in
these areas; (2) a wide range of magmatic
structures, many of which are developing
into nice “tools” for understanding both
the construction of magma reservoirs and
synchronous regional deformation; (3)
completing extensive detrital zircon studies
in the arcs to better understand the prearc basement, regional tectonism, and the
tempos of deformation and magmatism in
these orogenic belts; (4) structural studies
of host rocks to better understand mass balances in arcs; and (5) increasingly extensive
geochronologic and geochemical studies of
these systems.
loading by megathrust earthquakes in Japan; Tom Jordan and Phil
Maechling (Senior Computer Scientist) on IT and computational
advances for seismic wave propagation modeling; and discussions
with Yehuda Ben-Zion, James Dolan, and Meghan Miller on seismic imaging methods for fault zone structure.
For community service I play an active role in IRIS (Incorporated
Research Institutions for Seismology) guidance, having served on
different guidance committees for program oversight, long-range
strategic planning, and the Board of Directors.
And of course, I still play Ultimate disc when I can. I’m faculty
advisor to the university’s club team and give the occasional chalk
talk about underlying strategies and fundamentals.
I’m excited about several new collaborations in which I am working with (1) Jade
Star Lackey (Pomona) and Ben Clausen
(Loma Linda) to synthesize large isotopic
and elemental geochemical databases in a
number of arc sections to address the question of the driving mechanisms for tempos
of arc magmatism; (2) Keith Putirka and
students (Fresno State) on a study of the
gabbro to granite Guadalupe Igneous Complex, in the western Sierran Foothills; (3)
Pablo Alasino and Mariano Larrovere (La
Rioja University and CRILAR, Argentina)
on work in Argentina; and (4) Karel Schulman (Czech Republic) on work in Mongolia and northern China.
My wife, Valbone Memeti, recently
bought a new house in the Pasadena area
and we now have a guest room ready for
visitors. Vali also was delighted to get a Marie Curie Fellowship to go to Durham, England, to work with Jon Davidson on single
mineral geochemical studies of linked volcanic-plutonic systems. So we are “commuting” between two countries, and when
not debating the geochemical and physical
evolution of magmatic-volcanic systems,
having a grand time seeing different parts
of the world. She has been offered a tenure
track position at Colby College, Maine. But
we are debating the pros and cons since this
is a long way from LA and in a very differ-
GSA Penrose Field Forum 2012
ent setting.
One of our highlights during 2012 was
that Vali and I co-led—with colleagues Jade
Star Lackey, Rolund Mundil, Keith Putirka,
Bob Miller, and Jonathan Miller—a Geological Society of America Penrose Field
Forum in September. This forum involved
a weeklong trip and meetings held in the Sierras that was attended by 57 US and international scientists. Nothing better than debating magmatic systems in the high Sierra.
My present group of students is keeping me
busy helping them with a number of fun
projects. Adam Ianno will graduate shortly
after working on a tilted crustal section in
the Joshua Tree area in the Mojave Desert.
Adam has accepted a job at the University
of Texas, El Paso, making the 5th former
student of mine to now be working in Texas! Time for a Texas barbecue!
John Platt
Professor of Earth Sciences
Wenrong Cao is combining field studies of
regional deformation, faulting, and pluton
emplacement in the Sierra Nevada with
finite element modeling (in collaboration
with Boris Kaus, Germany) of magma ascent and downward flow of host rocks in
the arcs. Sean Hartman has recently begun
a study of ductile-brittle faulting and fluid
flow in the eastern Sierra while preparing
for his main study on migmatites and tectonism in Argentina. Barbara Ratschbacher, just arrived from Germany, has started
studies of the Guadalupe Igneous Complex, while planning her main research focus. Ben Gross who also just arrived, but
from Missouri, will soon start to work on
magmatism in the Cascades and on magmatic structures in Argentina. My recently
graduated student, Rita Economos, after
working at UCLA as a research scientist, is
I
contemplating a tenure-track offer at SMU
(yes, potentially my 6th former student in
Texas).
I also continue to enjoy working with
undergraduate students from all over the
world. We continue to involve these students (both Earth Science majors and
non-majors) in our research. Thanks to all
of our present and former Undergraduate
Team Research (UTR) students for your
help and continuing friendships.
I look forward to hearing about all of
your latest life adventures, job changes,
and future plans. Send me an email when
you have a moment. And don’t forget that
the high Sierra and our camp at Tuolumne
Meadows is a great place for friends and
families to visit. So if you have time come
join us this summer.
arrived at USC from London more than eight years ago now, though I still feel like the
new boy on the block. Right away I should thank Greg Davis for all the work he put in
by way of politics, arm-twisting, and back-slapping to make my appointment possible. I've never looked back—the climate, the landscapes, the fantastic geology, and the
good company at USC made it all worthwhile. I did my PhD at UCSB more decades ago
than I can remember, but I always felt I wanted to come back to California, and I finally did.
As often happens when you move to a new department, and a new country, I found
myself learning and doing new things. Greg persuaded me that there could be useful and
interesting discoveries to make in the Whipple Mountains, where he broke open the core
complex story many years ago. And in fact there were: with the help of a fancy new scanning electron microscope at USC with a detector that takes advantage of the schizophrenic
character of electrons (aka wave-particle duality), we've been able to find things out about
those rocks that they wouldn't even tell their mothers. This became part of the PhD project of one of my research students, Whitney Behr (now a new Asst Prof at UT Austin),
who constructed the first stress-depth profile through the crust, in Southern California or
anywhere else.
Meanwhile, another research student, Frances Cooper (now on Faculty at Bristol University in the UK), was re-evaluating the Snake
Range core complex using metamorphic thermobarometry to reconstruct the geometry of the footwall rocks to the detachment there.
She now has a project in Chile, working in collaboration with BHP Billiton to understand the origin of porphyry copper ore deposits.
Another big change happened at about the same time with the funding of the PICASSO project, a major research program focusing
on the deep structure of the mountain belts around the westernmost Mediterranean. I had been working there on the geology for many
years, but this program offered the possibility of resolving some of the arguments and settling some of the questions about the role of the
upper mantle in driving mountain building and basin formation in the region. With Thorsten Becker and Meghan Miller from USC,
and a group of geophysicists from all over the US and Europe, this project is now coming to fruition. On the geological side, research
students Katy Johanesen worked on a giant shear zone developed in the mantle rocks of the Ronda peridotite, near Gibraltar in southern
Spain; Whitney Behr worked on how eclogites make it back to the Earth's surface, and Jason Williams is hard at it working on how the
extensional collapse of the mountain belt contributed to the whole process.
Next off, we are trying to understand more about the structure and mechanical properties of major fault zones from the mid-crust
on down. My most recent research student, Leonardo Xia, is studying deformation mechanisms and shear heating on what seems to
be a fossil subduction zone interface in the San Gabriel Mountains of California, and we have plans to work on a number of major faults
around the world that have exhumed rocks from the middle or lower crust. Plenty to keep me busy for another decade or two!
Charles Sammis
Professor of Earth Sciences
T
hat’s Charles G. Sammis, FAGU. After years of fighting for
truth, justice, and the American way, I was finally elected a
Fellow of the American Geophysical Union. It’s hard to believe that it has been nearly ten years since the last newsletter.
During that time Adam Fischer got his PhD (in record time) and broke
my heart by going to work for ExxonMobil. The FAGU was not pleased.
He has tried to make it ok by endowing the “Adam Fischer Graduate
Student Foreign Travel Award” —a nice gesture, but not nearly enough to
justify going after the big bucks instead of the noble but impoverished life
of an academic. Ron Biegel went back to the law. Harsha Bhat arrived as
a post-doc from Jim Rice’s group at Harvard and carried on where Ron
left off in Ares Rosakis’ lab at Caltech using high-speed photography to
study the interaction of dynamic ruptures with off-fault fracture damage.
Being a smart person, he was also able to extend the quasi-static damage
mechanics I developed with Mike Ashby to take into account high-speed
fracture propagation. This has been a major step forward since all our applications in Earth science, such as underground nuclear explosions, meteorite impacts, and fracture damage at the tip of dynamic earthquake ruptures, involve very high loading rates. The Air Force
has funded this work for the past 15 years—I could go into more detail, but then I would have to kill you. Harsha has moved on to a faculty
position at IPGP Paris, thus alleviating my fear that I would single-handedly end the career of one of Jim Rice’s promising PhD students.
Adam was my last full-time student. I have been sharing Thomas Goebel with Thorsten Becker and working closely with Jonathan
Mihaly who is one of Ares Rosakis’ aerospace engineering students at Caltech. I hope to lure him to the dark side (geophysics) with a
post-doc when he graduates later this year. Toward that and other dark ends, I am spending this spring semester on sabbatical at Caltech
where I have a Visiting Associate Faculty Appointment in Aerospace Engineering, and an office on the third floor of Firestone with a gorgeous mountain view. Judy is still teaching Physics at South Pasadena High. Next year will be her last; she will then retire—which raises
the question of my own retirement. At first, retirement sounded good. But then it dawned on me that I have no hobbies and no talents to
pursue. It would just be me and Wally (my horrible black Bouvier de Flanders) watching TV and drinking beer all day. So, I went out and
bought a $1500 banjo and have begun working on three-finger bluegrass picking. The ultimate plan is to spend my retirement picking and
singing at the Mission Street Gold Line platform for tips. However, since I also show no talent for banjo picking, I am hedging my bets by
starting a new graduate student next fall and developing a new thematic option honor course: “Planet Earth”. It is beginning to look like
they will have to pry the chalk from my cold dead hand.
Our elder son Ian got his PhD in applied math from Berkeley, taught math at Holy Names University in Oakland for a couple of years
and is now a grade three Software Engineer at Google (talk about your big bucks). The younger son Glenn just got tenure in the Chemistry Department at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. We have four grandchildren: Ian has a son Sean (10) and a daughter
Harriet (6); Glenn has a daughter, Kayley (3) and a brand new son Nathan (4 weeks). At the rate these newsletters come out, this will
probably be my last. If you want to see me, just stop by the Mission Street Gold Line Station (and bring a few spare dollars).
Lowell Stott
Professor of Earth Sciences
I
’m now in my 24th year as a faculty
member at USC. And I’m very pleased
that Miguel Rincon, who came to
work with me as a high school intern 21 years ago, is still working with me.
Some of you may recall Miguel completed
his BS in Earth Sciences here at USC and
fortunately for me and other faculty and
students, he has remained a close colleague
and the climate laboratory manager ever
since. A few highlights of our work for
the past five years would include studies of
how sea surface temperatures in the tropical ocean changed in response to varying
concentrations of atmospheric CO2 and
changes in solar forcing during the last
glacial/interglacial transition. Several students have been involved in this research
over the years, including Deborah Khider
who completed her PhD in 2011 and is now
doing a post-doc at the University of Texas, Austin, where she is continuing to study
tropical ocean temperature variability.
We’ve also been studying how tropical
rainfall varied during the past 20 thousand
years in response to varying atmospheric
CO2 and solar forcing. This work involves
measuring the oxygen isotopic composition of various archives. In the tropics the
oxygen isotope composition of speleothem
carbonates and tree cellulose is a good
proxy for the “amount” of rainfall. And by
measuring these proxies we’ve been able
to investigate the history of monsoon rain
variability in India and China. This work
has been carried out in collaboration with
former PhD student Ashish Sinha, who is
now a professor of Earth Science at California State University, Dominguez Hills.
Justin Reuter completed his master’s thesis
with me and studied the rainfall variability
over northern Peru. He is now working on
a similar type of project for his PhD while
working full time for an aerospace engineering firm here in Los Angeles. But, this
time his research is focused on the Middle
East, especially Iraq.
Another recent PhD student, Mengfan
Zhu, completed his dissertation last year
on a study of monsoon rainfall variability using the oxygen isotope variability in
tropical tree cellulose as a proxy. Mengfan
was able to reconstruct a history of monsoon rainfall variability at monthly resolution for the past several centuries across the
Tibetan Plateau. Mengfan is now working
for a petroleum engineering company in
Houston, Texas. Max Berkelhammer com-
pleted his PhD studies in 2010 studying the
oxygen isotopic composition of rainfall in
the western US. Max is now completing his
post-doctoral research in atmospheric dynamics at the University of Colorado and
will begin a new appointment as assistant
professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago next January.
Currently I have two post-doctoral associates working with me on a project to
test the hypothesis: Recurrent modes of
decadal-length hydroclimate variability
(e.g. drought) in the North Pacific arise
from discrete SST anomaly patterns that can
be simulated in models. We’ve been funded
by the National Science Foundation to investigate how a shift in storm tracks would
be manifest in the oxygen isotope composition of rainfall along the west coast of
North America. We’re using both computer
climate models and isotopic measurements
of rainfall and tree cellulose collected along
the west coast to investigate how the isotope composition of rainfall varied during
the 20th century in response to storm track
variability and what climatic factors were
responsible for that variability. Post-doc
Nikolaus Buenning (PhD, Univ. of Colorado) is working on the modeling aspects of
this research. Post-doc Lisa Kanner (PhD,
Univ. of Massachusetts) is working on the
isotopic measurements of rain samples
and tree cellulose from sites in California,
Oregon and Washington. We are part of a
collaborative project with colleagues at the
University of Hawaii, the University of California, Santa Cruz and the University of
Colorado. This is a five-year project and we
are now in our second year.
Another research effort involves investigation of a provocative new hypothesis that
I set forth in a paper in 2011 that would account for the systematic variations in atmospheric pCO2 that accompanied each of the
glacial/interglacial climate cycles of the past
million years of Earth history. The hypothesis states: Glacial/Interglacial Atmospheric CO2 Cycles are Influenced by Storage/
Release of CO2-Rich Fluids From DeepSea Sediments. A new PhD student, Mark
Nishibayashi, joined my lab group this past
fall and will be undertaking dissertation research designed to test this hypothesis. A
validation of the Stott and Timmermann
hypothesis would have profound impact
on our understanding of how Earth's climate has been influenced by both external
(orbital variations) and internal (geologic)
processes. We had a research cruise to the
western Pacific in May of 2013 with German colleagues to collect new sediment
cores at sites where there may be geochemical “fingerprints” of hydothermal fluid release from the last deglaciation imprinted
on the sediment archives.
Josh West
Wilford and Daris Zinsmeyer Early Career Chair in Marine Studies and Assistant Professor of Earth Sciences
I
am continuing to build momentum within my research group and my teaching as I make my way through my third year at USC, and
my third year as the Zinsmeyer Chair. Needless to say, it is quite an adventure and I am delighted to have the opportunity to take part
in scientifically exciting projects (not to mention getting a chance to work in some amazing places, from Sichuan to the Peruvian
Amazon!). We now have a buzzing group up in the 3rd Floor of Zumberge Hall, with the addition of a 4th graduate student (Eric
Kleinsasser) who began in Fall 2012. Eric comes from Occidental College, is a top class long distance runner, and worked with me on an
undergraduate research project where he showed remarkable creativity.
Much of my research group’s effort this year has been focused on getting Doug Hammond’s and my Sichuan project properly off the
ground. Funding for this research from NSF began in April 2011 and has kept us busy with field and lab work since then. Though our
first field trip in the Spring of 2011 was somewhat disappointing (we just weren’t quite able to retrieve the sediment cores we were hoping
to collect), we returned in Spring of 2012 and were much more successful. Since then, we (well, mostly undergraduate student Zichen
Xiao and graduate student Gen Li) have been hard at work pulling apart the muddy record that we hope will tell us about the landslides
triggered by the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, and their wider environmental consequences. Hopefully we will have exciting results to report on this work. In the meantime, one fascinating outcome of the Sichuan project that we were able to present at the 2012 meeting
of the American Geophysical Union was the observation that very large earthquakes, such as in Sichuan, may induce enough landslide
erosion to actually have a net effect of removing material from mountains like the Himalayas. This is surprising, since we normally think
of mountains being formed by movement along faults, which mostly takes place during earthquakes. If big earthquakes such as that in
Sichuan actually seem to make mountains smaller, how can this work? What we have concluded is that it is the moderate magnitude
earthquakes – not the largest – that are responsible for building mountains! This has been a fun discovery and our arguments were well
received at the meeting. Hopefully we’ll be able to get it into press!
Other exciting research news for me and my group has been the funding of two other projects by NSF, both in collaboration with other
faculty at USC. On one project I am taking the lead, in collaboration with Prof. Sarah Feakins, and we will use Sarah’s isotopic tools to
identify the source of organic material carried by the Amazon River, at a field site in Peru where I have been working for many years. The
questions we are tackling there are important because the Amazon is one of the world’s most significant biogeochemical system, and yet
it is not clear if material carried by the river comes more from the Andes, where erosion is rapid, or from the Amazon floodplain itself,
where there is high biological activity. By bringing novel tools to bear on this question, we hope to add a valuable piece to the puzzle!
Finally, I recently received news that I am part of a team of three USC Earth Sciences faculty, including geodynamicist Thorsten Becker
and geophysicist Meghan Miller (who is the lead investigator), that
has been funded to look at how the islands of Indonesia are rising
from the sea over geologic time, as the Australian continent collides
with Asia. I look forward to sharing more news about this in the future, once we really get our teeth into the project.
The biggest news on the teaching front in the past year has been
that I have developed two new classes: an upper level undergraduate
class in Hydrogeology (GEOL/ENST 470) and a 200-level General
Education class in Energy Systems (GEOL 241). I am enormously
privileged to have had the opportunity to develop the curriculum
on these two topics, which I view as high among humanity’s greatest challenges in the 21st Century. Being able to educate so many
bright USC students about these issues is one of the most satisfying
parts of my experience here. One aspect of both courses that has been
particularly well received by the students, and is great fun as an educator, has been to organize field learning experiences—I have taken
my classes in the last year on a tour of the Los Angeles aqueduct in
Owens Valley, to the Chevron oil refinery in El Segundo, and to a
USGS deep drilling rig only a mile
from campus, among other sites. It is fun to see how seeing the
“real world” really helps to crystallize students’ understanding of
problems we discuss in lecture.
Doug Hammond, Josh West, and Jiang Fei in China 2012
Staff News
Mark Benthien
Associate Director for Communication, Education and Outreach for SCEC
M
ark began working for SCEC in 1996 after graduating from UCLA (BS, Applied
Geophysics) in 1995. He received a Master of Public Policy degree from USC in
2003. Mark communicates earthquake knowledge to end-users and the general public in order to increase earthquake awareness, reduce economic losses, and save lives. Many
of these efforts are in coordination with members of the Earthquake Country Alliance (EC),
a private-public partnership of organizations that provide earthquake information and services, for which Mark serves as Executive Director and lead organizer of ECA’s annual Great
California ShakeOut statewide earthquake drill. Mark was recognized in 2012 by the White
House as a “Champion of Change” for for his role in managing the California ShakeOut and
supporting the many other states and counties who are now conducting ShakeOut drills.
Scott Callaghan
Research Programmer for SCEC
S
cott as been with SCEC since 2008. He earned a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science in 2004
and a master’s degree in High Performance Computing in 2007, both from USC. He has worked
at SCEC in various capacities since he was a UseIT intern in 2004. He primarily works on scaling
up SCEC workflow applications, seismic hazard analysis, and staying on the good side of his chinchilla.
M
Robert de Groot
Project Manager
anager of SCEC’s Office of Experiential Learning and Career Advancement
since 2008, Bob experienced his first earthquake in 1971 (San Fernando, M
6.6) and was lucky enough to be standing on the platform of the San Andreas
Observatory at Depth (SAFOD) during the M 6.0 Parkfield earthquake in 2004. For SCEC
he manages the undergraduate research and K – 12 formal and informal education programs. He also coordinates the Earthquake Education and Public Information Center
(EPIcenter) Network, a consortium of free-choice learning institutions, such as museums, devoted to enhancing earthquake education programs and exhibits. Robert has a
PhD in science education from the University of Southern California in 2009 and has
been a member of the SCEC Communication, Education, and Outreach team since 1999.
David Gill
Research Programmer
R
esearch programmer and web developer for SCEC since 2011, David works on the shakeout.org site, velocity models, workflows,
and high-performance computing. He is a tried and true Trojan, having obtained a master’s degree in Computer Science from USC
in 2011. Originally from Canada, David is thankful every day for the sun and warmth the Los Angeles area provides.
Deborah Gormley
Administrative Coordinator
A
n adminstrative coordinator for SCEC and the Department since 2009, Deborah earned her Bachelor’s degree from USC in Environmental Studies. She
finds it ironic now to be working with so many Geo-enthusiasts, as she has
hated and feared rocks since falling into the Grand Canyon at the age of 3.
Barbara Grubb
Director of Instructional Laboratories
B
arbara Grubb continues to work as our department's Teaching Lab manager/developer/organizer. Each year brings new TA's
and new students to ZHS basement labs, which are in steady use throughout the school year. This coming year, we will instruct >1500 USC undergrads in various lab exercises. As you can imagine, this is a full-time juggling act. Barbara has very
recently moved to the San Gabriels, where she enjoys the serenity of mountain life, and somehow deals with the commute!
Tran Huynh
Special Projects Manager for SCEC
T
ran returned to USC in 2006 to manage special projects and events for SCEC, including
up to 40 workshops per year and an annual meeting of over 500 participants. She earned
a master’s degree in Earth Sciences from USC in 2003. Tran finds it amusing that “finding faults” is part of the job description when working for the Center. She is still thankful to
have never experienced a large earthquake firsthand.
Maria (Masha) Liukis
Software developer
M
asha, a software developer at SCEC working on CSEP, EEW and Transient Detection projects, holds a Master of Applied Mathematics from St. Petersburg State
University, Russia. Masha worked on space and astrophysics research projects
before joining SCEC in 2006 to work on “down to Earth” projects.
P
Philip Maechling
Information Technology Architect for SCEC
hil has worked at USC since 2002. Phil started his software development career after
earning his undergraduate degree in Applied Physics, and he earned his Masters in
Computer Science from USC after joining SCEC in 2002. He has developed a wide variety of software systems including commercial two-way radio firmware, military command and
control systems, seismic data acquisition and real-time earthquake monitoring systems, and
high performance seismic hazard analysis systems while at SCEC.
John McRaney
Associate Director of SCEC and Research Administrator for
Earth Sciences
I
am now in my 40th year at USC. I was part of the underground railroad group from LSU in the early 70s that included Pat Shanks, Tom
O'Neil, and Bill Seyfried.
My main effort for the past 23 years is managing the Southern California Earthquake Center. SCEC is universally recognized as the premier
academic center for earthquake research world wide. This work involves
interacting with over 100 SCEC PI's from nearly 60 institutions in addition to the large SCEC group here at USC. Not an easy thing to do, especially with the beginning of arthritis which makes replying to hundreds
of daily emails a bigger challenge each day. The SCEC work has clearly
been the highlight of my career and allowed me to engage in one of my prime passions, travel. A great personal benefit is that I (and
my wife Rebecca) are now close friends with many scientists (and in many cases their spouses) in the SCEC community, including the
outstanding team of SCEC people here at USC.
My career in Earth Sciences really began in the fall of 1976 when I was hired by Teng and Henyey to work with them on the Palmdale
Bulge, a now mythical belief that the earth was rapidly bulging upward as much as 50 cm near Palmdale. The bulge was believed to
be foreshadowing a major earthquake on the central San Andreas fault. Along with Teng, he wrote papers on groundwater radon and
earthquakes and rainfall and earthquake occurrence. The non-existent bulge was later shown to be a result of systematic refraction errors
in line leveling by surveyors over many years.
With no bulge to research, I started dabbling in proposal writing and research administration in the early 80s. The college dean liked
my work so much that he proposed paying my entire salary if he became a bureaucrat instead of a soft money researcher. The transition
to full-time bureaucrat came in 1984 when Kei Aki arrived at USC and we started the process of funding a science and technology center
here. It took seven years to get SCEC funded. But the rest is a very successful history.
During the past fifteen years, I have served on several national committees, including the EarthScope Working Group and the PBO
Steering Committee. Those groups were charged with getting EarthScope (the largest project ever funded by NSF in the Earth Sciences)
and PBO (part of EarthScope) funded. I was secretary of both groups and spent a significant part of his time at committee meetings,
organizing workshops, and helping getting white papers out on both projects. Both projects are now in full operation.
I have also been Secretary General of ACES since 2001. ACES is the APEC Collaboration for Earthquake Simulation, an international
group of researchers that uses high speed computers to simulate very large earthquakes. Fortunately this group meets often in exciting
places such as Maui, the Australian Gold Coast, Japan, and China.
I recently got my Medicare card. Rebecca was overly excited when it came in the mail, but when I pointed out that the only requirement to getting it was turning 65, the air went out of the balloon. Our life is built around golf, hiking, reading, eating great food, drinking
great wine, being with friends, working to get Democrats elected, and traveling to places with great golf courses. Though I am going to
break out of this mold and spend the first week of August salmon fishing in Norway. Since Rebecca is a United flight attendant, travel
for us (especially international travel) is quite easy and relaxing since we are normally in First Class. Which makes 15-hour trips to
Australia a great sleep.
Kevin Milner
Research programmer
K
evin has been a research programmer for SCEC since 2008, after earning his undergraduate degree in Computer Science from USC in 2007. His first exposure to SCEC was as
a UseIT intern in 2006 and 2007. Kevin now works on seismic hazards and earthquake
forecasting. Since 2012, he is also a part-time graduate student in Geophysics working with Professor Thomas Jordan.
I
Miguel Rincon
Department and Laboratory Technician
often feel like the undergraduate who never left. I was fortunate enough to cross
paths with my mentor and now boss, Dr. Lowell Stott. In 1991, we both participated in an NSF funded program that enabled high school students to do a research
project in a university near their home. Being born and raised in South Central L.A,
USC was the clear choice for me. During my senior year of high school, I would hop
on the bus after school and come to Dr. Stott’s Paleo-Climate lab to work on my research project. I loved that research experience so much that I enrolled into USC in
1992 and majored in Geology (now Earth Sciences). During my undergraduate years,
I worked in the same Paleo-Climate lab with Dr. Stott and enjoyed working on various
research projects. Right after graduating from USC in 1996, Dr. Stott offered me a
lab. tech. position in his lab. It was a dream come true. I currently work part time in
the Paleo-Climate Laboratory and more recently as Department Technician. I can proudly say that I’ve been part of the Earth Science
Department for more than half my life. It’s my second home.
Nerissa Rivera
Administrative Assistant
I
work part time assisting the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) team and part time for
the Center for Dark Energy Biosphere Investigations (C-DEBI). I started in this department in April and am really happy to be back at USC. I am a USC graduate with a BA in
Cinema/Television, class of 2006. I actually first met my husband on campus almost 10 years
ago! We are both big Disney fans and got married at the Disneyland Hotel in 2011. We went
to Disney World for our honeymoon and enjoyed it so much we returned there in February.
On the weekends you can usually find me hanging out at Disneyland or at home catching up
on my favorite TV shows. The past few months here have been great and everyone has made
me feel very welcome!
I
Pratixa Savalia
Research Lab Specialist
joined the Trojan family in 2010 when I joined Dr. Kenneth Nealson's lab as
a research technician. It was such a joy to be a part of the USC family, as my
husband is an alum and a huge fan of the school. I am now lab manager for
two faculty members of the Earth Sciences Department: Dr. Kenneth Nealson and
Dr. Jan Amend. My day here is filled with lots of running around—from ordering
lab supplies, to fixing and maintaining equipment, to getting new lab instruments
set up. I help graduate students and postdocs with their research, in addition to
working on my own independent research projects. The team here makes all this
seem like a breeze. In my short time at USC, I have made friends and developed
my research skills. And l keep learning! After work, I spend the rest of my day
chasing my 18-month-old son (a.k.a. little Tornado), keeping him from getting into too much trouble. The rest of my time I get to catch
up with my husband.
Fabio Silva
Research Programmer
F
abio has been working at USC since 2000. Starting with a computer networks
background, writing communication protocols for embedded wireless devices,
Fabio moved to environmental sensing, where he worked with scientists in diverse
scientific applications and deployments throughout the world: from studying mercury
cycling in rice paddies in China, to ecological research in the neotropical rainforests of
Costa Rica, to monitoring the contamination of salt lakes in Argentina. Fabio joined
SCEC in 2012, where he enjoys working with seismologists and computational scientists, generating ground motion simulations for scientific research and engineering applications.
Vardui Ter-Simonian
Administrative Services Coordinator
M
y employment journey at USC Earth Sciences started August of 1998. All
that time and I am still the first person you will see when you walk through
the door. Nothing much has changed, really, except everything is electronic
now. I survived 3 chairpersons, 15 commencements, 304 coffee hours, and I still enjoy working at the Department. Over the years I met many faculty and students, got a
little older, got married, and had kids. I would tell you everything I have been doing
in detail over the years, but I don’t think we can afford to print an alumni newsletter
as long as a thesis. Some of my recent endeavors were to travel to Munich, Germany,
on a “just Vardui Trip” during Spring Break and in September, I am going to travel to
Istanbul, Turkey. Other than that, most of my time after work, I spend with my family as a caregiver for my beautiful children and my mother along with my wonderful
husband. I love to hear from our alumni on Facebook. Keep in touch!
C
Cindy Waite
Student Services Coordinator
indy still writes guitar music and watches silent movies. She attended
L.A. Chamber Orchestra’s screening of Buster Keaton’s “Our Hospitality”
this summer, wearing a pair of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit ears because
they showed a newly discovered Oswald silent cartoon. Oswald was Walt Disney’s first character. The rights were stolen from him and that’s why we have
Mickey Mouse! Speaking of cartoon characters, here’s a photo of Cindy sporting
a becoming Robbie the Robot hat giving the Vulcan salute in front of the shuttle
Endeavor during the spring reception for Grad School fellows.
She also went to Colorado Springs this summer to visit family and eat at
Casa Bonita. If you’ve seen the Casa Bonita episode on South Park, yes, it really does exist and is even more bizarre than on South Park!
Especially at Halloween. Cindy, who is an active member of the lobbying group National Association of Railroad Passengers, traveled to
Colorado on a Southwest Chief sleeper car. She likes the little showers.
What she likes most, though, is working with geology students! They’re the best!
Karen Young
Special Projects Manager
I
A
fter 18 years, 1 daughter, 3 dogs, 4 moves (1 international) and numerous
vocations, I returned to USC Earth Sciences in 2008. Being back at the
Department and working with so many familiar faces (and new faces as
well) feels like coming home. My job title lets me do a little bit of everything­— from
proposal prep to grad student recruitment to SCEC subcontracts. When not working I spend most of my time negotiating traffic to and from Ventura County and
attempting to civilize our crazy, long-haired German shepherd, Tahoe, who makes
poor choices. Both of these endeavors have driven me to practice yoga in an effort
to regain my sanity. I am doing my best to uphold the USC banner in the family, as
I am outnumbered 2-1. Ed Young (PhD ’90) and daughter Colleen both work at
UCLA!
John Yu
Director of Computing Services
get older but everything stays the same. I’m not complaining though; I feel I have it quite nice
here in the Department. Technology is still changing and keeping me on my toes and employed. Got a puppy a few months ago -- named him Noodles because noodles are awesome.
Small dog, big personality. So I guess that’s new about me. I used to make fun of people that
wrote about their pets now I’m one of them. Moved to Pasadena about four years ago and closed
my Facebook account -- I like the tranquility. Now I’m forced to communicate with friends the
old-fashioned way - over lots of beer.
Our Students……….
I
think it’s safe to say that students become the Department’s legacy.
As has been our ‘tradition’, we place great stock and pride in our efforts to mentor
and provide training for our undergrads and graduate students. The list below
provides a roster of present grad students, future all-stars. The achievements of our
recent grads are too many to list, but in only the last 6 years our graduates have obtained
faculty, tenure track positions at: Bryn Mawr, Smith, UT Austin (2), Georgia Tech (2),
Kansas, U. Wisconsin-Milwaukee (2), CSU Fullerton (2), Texas Tech, UC-Santa Cruz,
Wisconsin-Eau Claire, Southern Methodist, San Diego State, Texas Christian, U. Minnesota, Lewis-Clark, U. Wyoming, U. South Florida, U. Illinois-Chicago, Bristol (UK), and
Florida State.
While USC has made a big push over the past decade to raise its research stature, academia is not the only successful path with a USC Earth Sciences degree. The Energy industry also manages to recruit some of our best and brightest each year. Recent graduates have gone on to Chevron, ExxonMobil, Schlumberger, Aera Energy, BP, and other
energy-related firms. We continue to place excellent students in this field and welcome
all sorts of partnerships. Our graduates are also leaders in Government, Engineering
geology, and Environmental fields and we’re equally proud of their achievements and
stature.
We also offer Earth Science undergrads a deep and robust degree, which includes
summer internships, research opportunities around the world, and several hard classes
with Doug Hammond!! Our recent undergrad majors have gone on to grad school at
Yale, UT Austin, Columbia, Caltech, USC and other great schools. Others have joined the workforce and a few are still undecided.
Approximately 50% of our undergrads go on to grad school.
Your support of grad and/or undergrad education is most appreciated. University support for grad students is being cut.
Support for undergrads is minimal. Any donation, of any amount, will be spent on the group you wish to support. Many
thanks!
Graduate Students for the last five years
1st Year Students - 2013
StudentUndergraduate Inst.Advisor
StudentUndergraduate Inst.Advisor
Dahlquist, Maxwell Univ Southern Indiana
West
Lu, Guang-Sin
Ewald-Share, Pieter University of Witwatersrand
Ben-Zion
Milner, Kevin
USCJordan
Nat’l. Taiwan Univ.
Grenader, Jessica
OccidentalDolan
Nishibayashi, Mark
Harris, Cooper
Miller
Ratschbacher, Barbara Tuebingen U.
U. North Carolina Chapel Hill
Whitman College
Amend
Stott
Paterson
Jun, Shao
Zhejiang Univ.
Stott
Roche, Tyler
PomonaAmend
Lee, Hye Jung
Univ. of Pennsylvania
Feakins
Song, Xin Univ Illinois Urbana
Jordan
Wu, Mong Sin
Univ. of Hong Kong
Feakins
Lusk, Alexander
Washington
Platt
Piazza, Olivia
Univ. of Miami
Berelson
Qiu, Hongrui
Univ. of Sci/Tech of China
Ben-Zion
Rogers-Martinez, Columbia U
Marshall
Sammis
Thompson, Jeff
3rd Year Students - 2011
Baronas, Jokubas
Jacobs University
Bottjer
Hartman, Sean
CSU Fullerton
Washington, Kirstin Univ. Pennsylvania
West
Holt, Adam
Imperial College
Becker
Wilmeth, Dylan
Corsetti
Li, Gen
China U-Geosci-Beijing
West
Ohio State Univ
Univ. Wisconsin Milwaukee
Hammond
Paterson
Yager, Joyce
Univ. Miami
Bottjer
Liddy, Hannah
BardFeakins
Zinke, Robert
Univ Texas Austin
Dolan
Liu, Xin
China U-Geosci-Beijing
Milliner, Christopher Imperial College
Ben-Zion
Dolan
2nd Year Students - 2012
Monteverde, Danielle
BucknellSanudo
Bardsley, Audra
BrownHammond
Butcher, Amber
CSU Pomona
Miller
Pinedo Gonzalez, Paulina
Universidad Nacional
Autonoma Mexico
West
Gross, Martin
U. Missouri
Paterson
Petsios, Elizabeth
CornellBottjer
Kleinsasser, Eric
OccidentalWest
Ross, Zachary
Cal Poly
Ben-Zion
Lippoldt, Rachel
Xia, Haoran
China U-Geosci-Beijing
Platt
U. Oregon
Becker
4th Year Students - 2010
StudentUndergraduate Inst.Advisor
StudentUndergraduate Inst.Advisor
Dee, SylviaPrincetonEmile-Geay
Kaplan, Michael
RiceBecker
Paulson, Elizabeth
Portland State
Jordan
Tems, Caitlin
Colorado College
Berelson
Klein, Nicholas
AugustanaSanudoWilhelmy
McAuliffe, Lee
USCDolan
Torres, Mark
PitzerWest
Ozakin, Yaman
Wang, Jianghao
NankaiEmile-Geay
Williams, Jason
Imperial College
Bogazaci, Turkey
Ben-Zion
Pietsch, Carlie
CornellBottjer
Platt
Richardson, Marci
JPLLund
5th Year Students - 2009
6th Year Students - 2008
Cao, Wenrong
China U-Geosci-Beijing
Paterson
Cheetham, Michael
OxfordCorsetti
Donovan, Jessica
U. S. Florida
Jordan
Ritterbush, Kathleen Cal Lutheran
Fleming, John
PrincetonBerelson
Haskell, William
U. Miami
Bottjer
Tackett, Lydia
TempleBottjer
Hammond
Ibarra, Yadira
BrownCorsetti
Undergraduates.....
USC Earth Sciences
Undergraduate Awards 2004-2013
Estwing Pick Award
W. A. Tarr Award
2004 Victoria Petryshyn
2004 Jillian Maloney
2005 Jeffrey Hoeft
2005 Matthew Ryan Smith
2006 Amelia Paukert
2006 Amelia Paukert
2007 none given
2007 Meghan Gray
2008 Rebecca Gallagher
Abraham Padilla
2008 Bradford Foley
Jeffrey Thompson
2009 none given
2009 Jeffrey Mulvihill
2010 Marlo Gawey
2010 Marlo Gawey
Harris Talsky
2011 Katie Harazin
2011 Jill Hardy
2012 Jack Seeley
2012 Tiffany Tsai
2013 Bridget Hellige
2013 Alexa Sieracki
Max Wagner
USC Earth Sciences - Giving
We greatly appreciate the financial help our alumni provide. In fact, your support is key to our success.
Alumni gifts support:
• Graduate Student Summer Support, Travel and Research
• Undergraduate Student Summer Field Camp and Research
• Post-doctoral Fellowships
• Vehicle and department facilities
We have several new initiatives in the works, opportunities to support our department and leave a
lasting mark.
One new opportunity involves the creation of the Friends of Earth Sciences:
A gift of $50 or more makes you a FoES, which makes you a Friend! Wear your FoES t-shirt proudly.
Special Gifts
A
All gifts to the Department are
tax deductible. Checks should
be made out to USC-Earth Sciences, and mailed to:
USC Dept. of Earth Sciences
c/o Karen Young
3651 Trousdale Parkway
ZHS 117
Los Angeles, CA 90089-0740
recent addition to our department’s interior walls
is a collection of beautiful, polished slabs of metamorphic, igneous and sedimentary rock. These
large (4’ x 6’) samples are tangible reminders of
why we love the earth sciences, will beautify our hallways and
used as teaching tools in our General Education (GE) labs.
Special gifts, above the $5K level, will give you the opportunity to dedicate one of these rock samples to commemorate
your bond to our department. Your name, or names, or text
will be inscribed in a plaque dedicating a rock in your chosen honor: a professor, a classmate, a loved one.